According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in the 19th century hardcore referred to rugged material suitable for use in applications such as the foundations of roads. By the early 20th century, it had taken on a metaphorical meaning, used as an adjective or a noun to refer to the most unwavering or intractable elements of a group, and in particular to the most diehard or stalwart adherents of a movement or ideology. By the late 1950s, it was also being used to denote extremism of another kind: explicit pornography.

As someone who knows absolutely nothing about fashion and can't spend more than 30 seconds thinking about "an outfit" before expiring, I still found this Sarah Nicole Prickett-moderated roundtable at Adult to be a good, long read. They discuss minimalism for the rich ("sparse luxe = Minimal, while sparse cheap = Plain. Minimalism as it’s commonly known can only exist in airtight upper-class vacuum") and minimalism for the not-rich (normcore, a concept full of holes, still ultimately reaching for a "blank check, white cube, vague, reflective, 'valueless' ideology… Any meaning. No stakes") and tackiness:

Normcore—it was funny, but it also effectively captured the self-aware, stylized blandness I’d been noticing. Brad’s source for the term was the trend forecasting collective (and fellow artists) K-Hole. They had been using it in a slightly different sense, not to describe a particular look but a general attitude: embracing sameness deliberately as a new way of being cool, rather than striving for “difference” or “authenticity.” In fashion, though, this manifests itself in ardently ordinary clothes. Mall clothes. Blank clothes. The kind of dad-brand non-style you might have once associated with Jerry Seinfeld, but transposed on a Cooper Union student with William Gibson glasses.

In The Lost Art of Dress, historian and dressmaker Linda Przybyszewski explores how American women's fashion went from floor-length dresses to bloomers to shirtwaist dresses to, yes, flour sack dresses. Before ready-to-wear and before fast fashion, American women created affordable clothing for themselves and their families with help from the Dress Doctors—the thrift experts, home economics professors, and fashion guide authors who advised women how to craft the most appropriate looks for less. Style changed with every step forward for women: gaining the vote, entering the world of work, heading academic departments. Recently, Przybyszewski and I talked about the evolution of American style, the fraught subject of home [...]